Lists in lists with style

Mmark is a markdown dialect for writing RFCs (or books!). The main reason it exists is because the IETF is developing a new XML format (version 3) for writing RFCs. This new format is way more powerful, so sadly Pandoc2rfc does not cut it anymore.

Right now mmark fully supports writing RFCs in XML2RFC version 2, but anything written can also be converted to the (work-in-progress) XML2RFC version 3 format. In a series of blog posts I will detail some of the features, such as list styling while remaining upwards compatible.

In XML2RFC you can “style” a list by using:

<list style="format (%I)">

Here we say use Roman numerals inclosed in braces: (I), (II), etc. In XML2RFC v3 this becomes:

<ul type="(%I)">

Mmark knows about these differences and allows you so say the following:

{style="format (%I)" type="(%I)"}
* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3

Where for the v2 output type is discarded and vice versa. In the v2 text output this is rendered as:

   (I)     Item 1

   (II)    Item 2

   (III)   Item 3

This also works for lists in lists:

{style="format (%I)" type="(%I)"}
* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3
{style="format *%I*" type="*%I*"}
    * Item 4
    * Item 5

Not giving the second IAL (inline attribute list), i.e. (the {style} thing), makes it fallback to the default.